U.S. restates aim: Democratic Cuba

But expectations low for end to autocracy

August 02, 2006|By Mark Silva, Washington Bureau.

WASHINGTON — With aging Cuban President Fidel Castro recuperating, the U.S. State Department and White House are promoting a hope that the island nation could make a transition to democracy--and promising to peacefully support any such move.

Nonetheless, Bush administration officials say they expect nothing but a transition of power from Castro to his equally dictatorial brother Raul in the event that the Cuban leader of 47 years does not recover.

The difference between the administration's public proclamations and actual expectations reflects the pressure that Cuban-American politics place on the White House, with Bush and every Republican president since the 1960s counting on the fervent support of the Cuban-born exile community in South Florida.

It's also a measure of the influence that several Cuban-Americans have gained with seats in Congress. They have embraced a non-negotiable demand that this or any administration commit itself to the cause of a free Cuba, including enforcement of a decades-old U.S. trade embargo against Castro's Communist regime.

The State Department and White House are promoting the hope of a free Cuba at a time when Castro, 79, might be sidelined for at least several weeks.

"We believe that the Cuban people aspire and thirst for democracy, and that given the choice they would choose a democratic government," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday, the day after Castro's surgery was announced.

"The one thing this president has talked about from the very beginning is his hope for the Cuban people finally to enjoy the fruits of freedom and democracy," said White House spokesman Tony Snow. "We stand ready to help. . . . And we will be ready and eager to provide humanitarian, economic and other aid to the people of Cuba."

Brother most likely successor

Yet Snow acknowledged that what U.S. and Cuban experts see as the most likely immediate transition of power leads only to Raul, commander of the Cuban army and security forces and master of the regime's politically punitive prisons.

"For the dictator, Fidel Castro, to hand off power to his brother . . . is not a change," Snow said. "There are no [U.S.] plans to reach out. . . . The fact that you have an autocrat handing power off to his brother does not mark an end to autocracy."

Privately, administration insiders caution against any predictions of demise for Castro, who will turn 80 on Aug. 13.

If Bush is stirring hopes of a democratic transition, he owes his own election in part to the strong support of Cuban-American voters in Florida's disputed election of 2000. He won more than 80 percent of Miami's Cuban-American vote in state that handed him the White House by a mere 537-vote margin.

And he made the obligatory pledge to Cuban freedom on Monday as he visited Miami and had breakfast at Versailles, an institution in Miami's Little Havana.

"If Fidel Castro were to move on because of natural causes, we've got a plan in place to help the people of Cuba understand there's a better way," Bush said on Miami's Spanish-language Radio Mambi, WAQI-AM. "No one knows when Fidel Castro will move on."

Since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, when the U.S. failed to support an American-trained force of Cuban exiles who were attempting to oust Castro, a generation of Cuban-born voters has given overwhelming support to Republican presidents, peaking at more than 80 percent backing for Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and for Bush's first election in 2000.

Democrats make inroads

Yet a second generation of Cuban-Americans with no direct connection to the island has shown more willingness to support Democrats. President Bill Clinton won close to 40 percent of Florida's Cuban-American vote in 1996. Then-Vice President Al Gore fared poorly in 2000, when the Clinton-Gore administration forcibly removed a young Cuban refugee, Elian Gonzalez, from a relative's home in Miami and returned him to Cuba.

And Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) gained ground among Florida's second-generation Cuban-Americans in the 2004 election, said Joe Garcia, executive vice president of the New Democrat Network and ex-director of the Cuban American National Foundation.

The exile community also has elected members to Congress--the brothers Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.). And Florida has elected Republican Sen. Mel Martinez, who arrived in the U.S. as a child in the 1960s with the Catholic Charities' "Peter Pan" airlift of children.

But the White House plays by a rule book still written by the Cuban caucus.

"Ten or 20 years ago, you had to make the decisions without any real Cuban power in the room," Garcia said. "Today there are actual power players, three Congress people, a senator, people in the administration. I don't think they can act in a vacuum, but likewise they aren't in any big hurry to get any reaction going, because what they fear most is instability. Right now the last thing they want is for anything to break open."